IN PERFORMANCE: DANCE

By JACK ANDERSON

Published: November 13, 2000

Merce Cunningham

Joyce Theater

Merce Cunningham choreographically conjured new worlds out of old once again when his Merce Cunningham Dance Company presented another Event on Wednesday night.

Like all the 90-minute productions Mr. Cunningham calls Events, this one was made up of fragments from various dances taken from their original contexts and so rearranged as to form a totally fresh entity. The designs and accompaniment were created especially for this occasion; no two Events are ever quite the same.

In this one, dancers kept assembling and constantly regrouping as if they were forming crystals with their bodies. Then by dispersing they let those crystalline shapes dissolve. There were also passages of slow bends as well as sequences in which dancers carefully carried one another or allowed themselves to be dragged across the floor.

This Event had both the charms and annoyances of most such presentations. It revealed Mr. Cunningham to be a master at devising patterns in space, but Events, being potpourris, often appear much too miscellaneous in nature.

What can prevent Events from seeming alike are their settings and scores. In this one, the dancers wore simple black costumes at the start and simple red ones at the conclusion. Aaron Copp's lighting bathed the backdrop in a pearly glow. The designs by Carla Klein, a Dutch painter, made faint outlines of rectangles occasionally visible on it. There was also a panel, which Ms. Klein called ''Postcard I (2000),'' that showed structures resembling stairs and an archway.

The score, devised by Paul De Marinis and Takehisa Kosugi, combined taped sounds with bits of live violin music and was filled with sighings, tinkling chimes, sputterings, thunderings, faint echoes of sentimental Hawaiian tunes and instructions given by the teacher of an exercise class. JACK ANDERSON